The Shards, page 61
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I NEVER WENT back to Buckley that day. Instead I just drove aimlessly.
I made it as far out as Bakersfield and then to Barstow and then I don’t know how I found myself in Lancaster—I was just driving without any sense of destination or purpose. I filled the car up at a 76 station in Littlerock, where I washed my scratched palms in the men’s-room sink and wetted a towel and wiped the gravel still stuck to my scraped knee and then ended up in Pasadena and drove all the way down to Anaheim, and when I hit Huntington I realized I could find the beach at Crystal Cove and park on the bluff where Matt Kellner’s bloodstained backpack had been found and where he was tortured in front of a bonfire, but decided I couldn’t—what would the point be, why would I hurt myself like that? I wasn’t listening to music; it was completely silent within the cabin of the Mercedes as I just kept processing what I’d seen in the house on Benedict Canyon and then just as quickly trying to forget what was in it. I drove up the coast and got all the way to Malibu by the time night was falling and thought about stopping at Jeff Taylor’s in the Colony to buy Quaaludes and weed but realized I couldn’t talk to anybody. I wouldn’t be capable of speech; a conversation, let alone a transaction, would have been impossible. Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, and then I hit traffic on the 405 heading back to the empty house on Mulholland. By the time I returned home it was almost nine o’clock and the gas tank was near empty—I had filled it up again at a gas station on Pacific Coast Highway at dusk. I was starving and exhausted as I let myself into the house. Shingy danced around me while I opened the refrigerator and just stared into it until I began to weep. I moved to the bedroom and took off my uniform and ignored the red light blinking on the answering machine and opened the drawer of my nightstand and took the two Valiums I had left and then spent forty minutes in the shower, until I was tired enough to dry myself off and fall into bed, where my only point of reference was the blank, wide face of an iguana staring at me from a glass cage in the locked basement of a house on Benedict Canyon. That night I slept through the six phone calls that landed hourly, a silent message recorded each time; I could barely hear the shallow breaths on the other end of the line when I listened to them the next morning.
27
TUESDAY. I took half of a Quaalude before I left for Buckley. I drove into the parking lot and could feel the drug lightly pressing down on me, slowly erasing any fear or sadness, worry or doubt—it was going to transform Bret into the tangible participant and promised to ease me through the day, which would be watery, with everything shimmering in the glow of the Quaalude. I drove by Ryan Vaughn talking to Thom Wright, the two of them standing by the white Corvette no one had seen for a week, and I offered a surprised face at Thom, who smiled tightly at me and then turned back to Ryan. I parked in my space and sat still, controlling my breathing, murmuring to myself that it was going to be okay, until I felt relaxed enough to confront the morning—it wasn’t as if the Quaalude had already hit (this usually took about thirty minutes—I was almost there) but it was the idea it would be hitting me soon that offered comfort and peace.
As I got out of the car and slung the Gucci backpack over my shoulder I noticed, one row over, Debbie talking to Rita Lee and Tracy Goldman by her BMW. Debbie automatically noticed me and offered a casual wave, unsmiling as she kept talking, and I nodded at her as I headed to Thom. I didn’t see Susan’s car and I didn’t even bother looking for Robert’s Porsche. In my tracking shot I watched as Ryan clapped Thom on the back and began walking out of the moving frame—this would ordinarily have wounded me but the thought of the Quaalude overtaking my consciousness was making everything bearable and I smiled as I approached Thom. His hair was wavier than usual and there was light stubble on his face, which meant he probably hadn’t shaved all week. He offered a wan smile as I neared him. He seemed tired up close and thinner. “Welcome back. How was the trip?” I asked. “Change your mind and going to UMass?” He offered a forced grin and shook his head. “No,” he said quietly. “Don’t think so.” He checked his watch and looked out over the parking lot, distracted. And then he turned back to me. I knew that he was looking for Susan’s car and that he’d been waiting for her. It was nearing nine o’clock and we watched as the girls started heading toward us, moving across the parking lot, a reminder that class was starting soon. “You stayed for a football game,” I said. “So it must’ve been fun.”
“I didn’t want to stay,” Thom said. “But my dad already had the tickets.”
“Why didn’t you want to stay?” I asked.
He became briefly annoyed. “I was already gone a week.”
“How’s Lionel?” I asked, wanting to engage him and erase this distance that was separating us.
“He’s good, I guess,” Thom said, unenthusiastic. He started telling me about the trip but he was going through the motions—he didn’t care and really had nothing to say. And then he stopped as if he remembered something. “I talked to Susan last night,” he said as we neared the bell tower. “When I got back.” I dreaded the mention of her name but knew it was inevitable.
“Yeah?” was all I asked.
“She told me what happened to Terry,” Thom said. “Jeez, how did that happen?”
I stopped walking. “Thom.”
He turned. “Yeah?”
I just stared at him, not knowing what to say. He quickly became concerned.
“What is it, dude?” he asked quietly.
“I think, um, that…” I began. I felt I could say anything. I was about to start melting and I was feeling so loose that I could have simply blurted out the truth: Susan and Robert are together. And I almost did, before we were interrupted. Thom looked up and I felt a hand on my neck and then Debbie kissed me on the lips and smiled at Thom as Rita and Tracy passed us.
“Welcome back,” she said.
“Hey, Debbie.” Thom cocked his head. “There’s something different about you…”
Debbie cocked her head as well, waiting.
“It’s the hair,” he said, smiling, as if pleased with himself for figuring it out, momentarily taking him away from whatever was troubling him. “Looks great.”
“Thanks.”
Debbie walked with us beneath the bell tower, heading toward our first class.
“We were just talking about what happened to your dad,” Thom said.
“You talk to him?” I asked her. “Did you find out what happened?”
“No,” she said. “He doesn’t remember. He had been, in his own words, inebriated and wasted. Blitzed. He remembers nothing. He doesn’t even remember what he was doing upstairs.” Liz and Debbie had visited him, separately, at UCLA Medical Center on Monday afternoon. “Where were you yesterday?” she softly asked me.
This was how Terry was going to play it, I dully realized in that moment. He wasn’t going to blame anyone, no one was pushed, he wasn’t going to bring Robert Mallory into the narrative, which would now fade away because it was an accident Terry couldn’t remember.
I ignored Debbie’s question. “So he doesn’t remember if it was an accident?”
“What would it be otherwise?” she asked. “Why wouldn’t it be an accident?”
“Maybe he was pushed,” I suggested, remarkably calm.
“Pushed by who, Bret?” Debbie sighed heavily.
“I mean, I just wondered if he actually fell or if he was pushed,” I said. “I guess Terry doesn’t remember.”
“No, my father doesn’t remember,” she said with a quiet finality that I translated into: Don’t ever ask me this again.
We arrived at the bungalows just past the administration building and Thom paused at the classroom I was about to enter and then checked his watch and without saying anything headed off to his first period, and Debbie waited until he was out of earshot to ask me if I was all right. This was becoming her mantra to me, and if I hadn’t been on the verge of getting stoned I might’ve said something allusive and bitchy, but the Quaalude let me kiss her forehead and assure her I was fine. She wasn’t convinced and stared at me hard. “What?” I asked, feeling completely relaxed. “What’s wrong?”
“Are you high?” she said. “You’re high, aren’t you?”
“A little,” I confessed. “I took half a ’lude before school.”
“Why?” she asked. “Are you still upset?”
“No,” I lied. “I’m better. Everything is fine.”
“What were you talking to Thom about?”
“Nothing,” I said. Debbie’s presence was suddenly straining against the oncoming blurry warmth of the drug.
And then she said in a low voice, “You’re not going to do something stupid and tell Thom anything, right?” I waved a hand in front of her face to indicate she had nothing to worry about and kissed her again and then floated into American Fiction and sat at my desk, glancing over at where Susan should have been. I was able to acknowledge Ryan and pulled out my copy of Slaughterhouse Five and smiled woozily at Mr. Robbins. The bells were chiming and I noticed a figure dashing along the walkway beyond the tinted windows and it was Susan, who made it to class just before the bells faded. She nodded at Mr. Robbins and then slid into the seat next to mine. I realized that she had purposefully arrived late, not wanting to see Thom—or anyone else—in person. I don’t remember saying anything to her and I can’t remember the next class, but at assembly the dream threatened to unravel when Robert Mallory appeared, standing in the courtyard beneath the Pavilion, where I watched as Thom gave him a very quick dude-hug. I had thought that Thom was figuring something out, that he had spent the week putting the pieces together, that somehow he knew Robert Mallory wasn’t gay, and that Susan’s new blankness was tied into moving away from Thom, preparing herself for a future without him—but apparently not.
After assembly Thom and Susan were standing beneath the flagpole before Phys Ed and I could finally feel the faint new spike in the narrative that would be altering everything soon. They were softly talking to each other; this was a seemingly normal conversation—placid, even. Thom seemed to be asking soft questions and Susan seemed to be softly answering him and there was nothing angry or defiant in either of their stances. But only if you didn’t know the secret history that was playing itself out. You would have thought this was a couple in love, a dream, the sensitive jock and the numb beauty, the high school cliché, reunited after a week apart.
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BUT ON GILLEY FIELD Thom walked up to where I was lying on the bleachers, his body blocking everything out except the crisp neon-blue autumn sky edged around him. I was enjoying my high, stoning out on the small green world below, prone at the top of the stands, forgetting everything I’d seen in the abandoned house on Benedict Canyon, and the beige-colored van, and the 5th Dimension poster hanging in Debbie’s bedroom, and the phone calls both she and I had been receiving. Thom stood over me, backlit, just a shadow, and I took off my sunglasses and stared up at him. “Did you know that Susan went to Palm Springs last weekend?” was the first thing he asked. I didn’t know how to answer that.
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “To see her grandparents. Right?”
Thom was silent. I struggled to sit up. He just stood over me.
“She didn’t pick up any of my calls,” he said tonelessly. “She was never home to pick up any of my calls. She only called back once. The entire week.”
“But weren’t…you traveling around?” I managed to ask.
He ignored me. “She never told me she was going to Palm Springs and she goes the day I left? She never told me that.” He turned and looked at the field as if he was searching for her. She was standing by the tennis courts with Debbie—they were both holding rackets and wearing sunglasses. Robert wasn’t on the field. Thom’s outline turned back to me. “Did she go with anybody? Did she go with Debbie?”
“I don’t think she—”
“Had she mentioned anything to you?” He cut me off.
“No, she hadn’t,” I said. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“That she was going to Palm Springs to see her grandparents? No.” He paused. “She said that she had and that I’d forgotten.”
Anger was about to obliterate the high I was coasting on.
“Robert was out in Palm Springs, too,” I said, controlling myself to not go any further than that. Thom had to piece this together on his own. He would never forgive me if I told him the truth—I would always be connected to his pain.
“Robert?” Thom asked. “Mallory?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He was out there, too, that weekend…”
“So what?” he said, confused, and then, “Were they together?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Robert was staying in Rancho Mirage.”
“What are you trying to say, Bret?” Thom asked in the coldest voice I’d ever heard from him.
“I don’t think Robert is gay,” I said quietly.
Thom didn’t say anything. He just stood there, immobile.
“How do you know that,” Thom finally said. He did not inflect this as a question.
“Thom…” I started, again yearning to tell him what I knew.
He just stood above me, looking down, trying to process whatever I was attempting to tell him—processing not the precise information exactly but why I seemed so tentative and lost when I was trying to talk to him about his girlfriend and Robert Mallory. The shape standing above me seemed gripped in a small but rising panic. He knew I wanted to tell him something he really didn’t want to hear, and I ultimately didn’t. I was both surprised and not surprised that it had taken Thom Wright as long as it did to figure out that something was very wrong.
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HE MADE the connection at lunch that day and I remember I had never seen anything as magical as Thom silently staring at Susan and Robert beneath the shadow of the Pavilion and realizing something—his silent realization was more thrilling than any elaborate special effect. I didn’t want to sit with anyone, so I arrived at the row of senior tables early and sat two over from the center table—I didn’t want my high interrupted. But when Debbie saw where I was sitting she just slid in across from me, followed by Susan and Thom, who also sat across from each other—and I noted that Thom hadn’t brought a lunch, which suggested something had been misplaced or broken, a lack of order had surfaced in Thom’s world; he didn’t care anymore. The talk between Debbie and Susan was chatty and perfunctory, with Thom and me often not saying anything. And then Robert showed up and sat next to Susan and it was that one moment when Susan and Robert casually ignored each other that gave Thom the meaning he needed to help him see more of what was going on and expand the narrative. I watched Thom while Susan and Debbie kept talking, and though they tried, once or twice, to engage me or Thom, they completely ignored Robert. This was the wrong move, the bad tactic, the thing that made Thom suspect, the strain was so obvious. I stared as Thom noticed this and his face subtly shifted expressions: it was so light there was barely a signal, but I was the one watching Thom pretending to listen to the girls’ conversation. I was the one who saw his eyes moving from Susan to Robert as the conversation continued. I was the one who felt his frustration and the betrayal. He actually pushed away from the bench and scowled lightly to himself at one point, as if he suddenly remembered something he had to do after school and had forgotten about. It was a very small motion and I was the only one who saw it, I thought, closing my eyes for a moment.
“So you were out in Palm Springs, too,” Thom finally said, staring at Robert, with something like wonder.
He had interrupted the conversation between the girls and it suddenly stopped.
“Two weekends ago,” Thom said quietly. “When Susan was out there. Visiting her grandparents.”
Robert said, “We didn’t even know we were both out there until I got back to school on Monday.”
“How did you know this?” Susan asked Thom, curious. “I mean that Robert was out there.”
“Bret told me,” Thom said flatly.
I could tell Susan looked over at me but I was staring at Thom.
“Oh,” she said. I heard her ask me, “You did?” I ignored her.
“What were you doing there?” Thom asked.
“Visiting some friends,” Robert said.
“What friends?” Thom asked. “I didn’t think you had any friends. Friends from L.A.? Who else do you know in L.A. but us?”
“Friends of my family,” Robert said. “Friends from Chicago.”
“Really?” Thom asked. “They’re out in the desert? In Rancho Mirage? Your friends from Chicago.”
“Yeah,” Robert said. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Thom said, looking between Susan and Robert, his eyes darting from one blank face to the other. “It just sounds weird.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Susan said. “You sound weird.”
“Yeah, babe, it does,” Thom countered. “You’re both out there the same weekend and you never told me you were going out there in the first place?”
The way Susan said, “What are you trying to say?” was both an awful tease and a rehearsed denial. What was maddening about witnessing this was that if you knew the truth—as everyone at that table did except Thom, who was just now realizing it—this was a kind of torture for Thom, and I didn’t understand what their plan was, how they were going to let him down easy, if they were even going to tell Thom at all. Maybe they just hoped he’d figure it out for himself without any confirmation and then move away from Susan and on to someone else.
